Cracked Eggs and Friendship

My girls (the ones who use a potty at least) are four and two and already they tell each other, “Come to the potty with me. I don’t want to go by myself.” So, while men might find this perplexing, this friendship thing among girls is a very big deal. And it starts early.

Whenever I get in an emotional funk, it’s usually because I’m feeling disconnected from my husband or from my close girlfriends. Nothing messes me up more than something being awry with those relationships. And despite our culture where we are “connected” around the clock, the type of friendship that feeds the soul takes more than Instagram and Facebook. Liz texted me a couple weeks ago and said she was feeling disconnected. I told her I felt the same, and we decided to set up a time to talk on the phone every week so we could just catch up and hear each other’s voice. We don’t talk about anything earth shattering. It’s potty training hilarity and Friends quotes and everyday craziness. But the craziness feels less crazy when you aren’t the only one.

Liz called me Saturday and instead of hello when I answered I got, “How do you know if a child’s thumb is broken?” A few minutes later I was meeting her halfway to get one kid so she could take her other to get checked out. I took her daughter to her sister’s house because it’s just a few doors down from Liz’s, and when I got there her sister (also my friend) Becca opened the door and said, “I have an egg bound hen.” It turns out one of her hens couldn’t get her egg to “leave the hatch” so to speak. I go in and watch her kids and Liz’s daughter and my oldest while she heads outside to check on the hen. She calls me over to the back door and we look out and see one of the other hens with her wing wrapped around the poor egg bound hen. And then we looked down and saw the “stuck” egg cracked on the patio.

That’s what friendship is. It’s messy and inconvenient. It takes time and energy and vulnerability. But we all have days where we feel stuck. (Hopefully a bit more metaphorical than the poor chicken.) We need someone to wrap a wing around us. Someone to sit beside us when the egg cracks and we’re in pain. And somewhere in the middle of all that messiness, we find a relationship that makes us better than we could ever be on our own.